


The Circus of Nights! A Hundred Delights!

by Birdbitch



Series: Vampires [1]
Category: Batman (Comics), DCU
Genre: Alternate Universe, M/M, Vampires, circuses
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-23
Updated: 2015-09-23
Packaged: 2018-04-23 01:12:22
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,043
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4857560
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Birdbitch/pseuds/Birdbitch
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When Dick spots the count from behind the big top curtain, he knows immediately that he wants him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Circus of Nights! A Hundred Delights!

**Author's Note:**

  * For [st00pz](https://archiveofourown.org/users/st00pz/gifts).



> The title comes from an old Hammer film titled "Vampire Circus." While the vampires in this are not necessarily villainous, as the ones in that movie are, it still felt like a nice place for an homage to the genre. 
> 
> Written for St00pz, who is always lovely to work with.

It’s his first night in Gotham City proper when Dick sees the aristocrat. He sits in the first row of the audience, eyes kept rapt with attention not on his date but on the firebreathers, the pre-show entertainment. Dick watches from behind the curtains, eyes focused on the stranger, on the sharp angles of his face and the width of his shoulders. He feels enraptured, wants to call the show quits entirely and race out to take him, or be taken, or whichever would be more appropriate. Instead, he waits, and being so occupied with spying, jumps when his mother touches his shoulder.

“Watching the show?” she asks, and Dick nods his head, doesn’t question when she moves so she can see what he’s seeing. “Oh. Oh, Dick.” His name comes out with an exasperated fondness, and he thinks he should probably be too old for her to say it and for him to get red in the face at this point (almost a century, at this point), and he frowns in response.

“It’s nothing,” he says, and she moves away from him.

“There were rumors that he was one of us.”

“Were there?” He wants to ask, is he? but by doing so he’d reveal just how interested in the man he really is, so he keeps his question like this and tries to feign disinterest.

“He’s not, of course,” she says, and she puts a hand on Dick’s shoulder. “Count Wayne is a temporary kind of person. It’s best not to get too involved.” It’s meant to be a piece of advice, and she’s not unkind about it--she really never is--but Dick wishes she’d keep it to herself. Neither of his parents had ever been involved with humans, but they had seen enough people who had to know the risks in doing so.

He takes one last glimpse at Count Wayne before letting the curtain drop back down, and he follows his mother towards the distant figure of his father so that he can do their pre-show warmups.

 

\--

 

After the show, Bruce feels it’s prudent to send Vicki Vale on her way home. She makes a wonderful date, and she had asked him to bring her to the circus, but she couldn’t have known how splendid a creature the acrobats’ son was, and she couldn’t have reasonably expected Bruce to follow her back to her flat when he never had before. Instead of heading home himself, he finds himself wandering the grounds of the circus, unwilling to leave. Maybe he’s been bewitched, he thinks. There is a sideshow tent, which Bruce finds himself drawn towards, and when he enters, he sees the young man talking with a man covered in hair.

“Dick,” the werewolf says, and he directs his attention towards Bruce, who would flinch if he were anyone else.

“Oh,” Dick says, and he steps towards Bruce. He’s shorter than Bruce would have thought--almost a head shorter than Bruce himself--and for some reason it makes him all the more endearing. “You were in the front row tonight.”

“I was,” Bruce says. He struggles, wanting to be bolder. “You were lovely. I was impressed.”

“I’m glad,” Dick answers. He has a coy, shy smile on his face, and it feels intimate in comparison to the grin he wore while performing. “The sideshow’s going to be closing soon, as are most of the attractions. Most people have already gone home. Why are you still here, Count Wayne?”

He looks behind Dick, looks for the werewolf, but it seems they’re alone now in the small, dark tent, lit only by a few lanterns hanging from thick iron stakes. “I wanted to offer my appreciation for the show,” he says.

“Is that all?” Dick leans in closer. “I was worried you might be a vampire.” He says it with a wink, like maybe he doesn’t actually believe in vampires at all, and Bruce frowns.

“Are they that much of a problem?”

He expects Dick to make a witty remark immediately, but instead Dick looks away and gets a wistful smile on his face. “Circus folk are all superstitious, you know,” he says instead, and he looks back up at Bruce. “You really shouldn’t be in here, though. It gets dangerous when the show’s over.” He takes Bruce’s arm and leads him out of the tent, and Bruce likes the idea of walking with him enough that he doesn’t complain.

“How long are you going to stay in town?” Bruce asks, and Dick shrugs.

“I’m not sure,” he answers. “When they tell us to leave, we leave.” Bruce doesn’t ask who, assumes Dick must mean the owner of the circus. Seeing that Bruce doesn’t like the answer--doesn’t like the uncertainty, doesn’t like knowing how long (or how little) he might have to plan, Dick touches his arm again. “We’re usually around for a week,” he says.

“That doesn’t seem like a very long time.”

“No,” Dick says, and he lets his gaze drop towards the ground again. “It doesn’t, does it?”

 

\--

 

They eat before the show, while Haly drums up business in front of the big top. Everyone eats together because that’s how the circus functions--even the animals in their cage wagons get fed while everyone picnics beside them. Dick has a tendency to give pieces of his food to Zitka the elephant. “That count is in the audience again,” Wilhelm, the lion tamer, says, and Dick’s father, John, nods his head.

“Perhaps he’ll become a patron,” he says, and he looks at Dick, who’s become too focused on his food in the past thirty seconds to not have anything he wants to say. “What is it, Dick?”

“It’s nothing.”

“Mary?” John turns to his wife, who looks at Dick and shakes her head.

“If he says it’s nothing, it’s nothing,” she answers. She knows, of course, was waiting for Dick to get back to their wagon after he escorted Bruce Wayne off of the fairground, and she’s not necessarily happy about it, but that doesn’t mean she’ll say anything about it.

John shrugs and goes back to his meal--venison, still raw and bloody, and it’s the same that almost everyone else is eating. “It’s not so bad if we have a regular in the city,” he says. “I don’t mind it here, and if there’s someone with enough money to bring us back during the season…”

“It would be bad if he became interested in any of our daughters,” Samson, the strongman, says, and then the group laughs. Bad maybe for Count Wayne, they agree, because there’s nothing that throbs so deeply in a young vampire than the craving for blood. They’re most dangerous when they’re under 70, before they’ve grown out of the impulse to attack anything that comes too close to them without any others around.

Dick excuses himself from dinner, and his father follows him shortly after to the parallel bars they have to warm up on. “Tell me about Count Wayne,” he says, and he keeps his voice soft. He’s not angry, doesn’t usually get angry unless Dick has put himself into danger and even then, it’s out of concern more than anything else, but Dick doesn’t want to talk about it, about Bruce, about anything with him.

That doesn’t mean he’s excused from doing so, though, and he dangles from his knees on the highest bar and avoids making eye contact with his father. “He’s nice,” he says.

“He’s come to three of the shows so far,” John says. “There’s something you’re not telling me.”

The second night, Bruce had met him behind the big top, had held his hand and said, I don’t know what I’m doing, and Dick, liking the way he smelled, liking the attention and the look of Bruce’s eyes, liking the way he could feel the man’s pulse quicken when he got closer, squeezed it and replied, I don’t know, either. Bruce leaned in, kissed him, and Dick had to hold his breath to keep from letting his fangs graze anything. Dick wanted, had wanted so much more, and held onto Bruce even after the kiss ended. Pursue me, he said, and Bruce nodded, leaned in to kiss him again, and left when Dick told him to. There was a terrible, unmistakable bond between them from the first moment and as soon as Bruce was gone the first night, Dick couldn’t help the fear in the pit of his stomach that grew at the idea of never seeing him again.

“I don’t know what you want me to say,” he answers, because there’s no way in hell that he’s going to tell his father about how searing it felt when Bruce’s bare hand grazed across his cheek and travelled back to hold his neck still. The flesh of the living is always warm, but this was different and he has no intention of letting anyone, except maybe his mother, know.

“Dick,” John says, and he sits down on the ground to look up at his son’s dangling face. “He’ll hurt you. They always do.” He pauses. “What if you were to lose control? Would you even know how to save him? I know sometimes you’re lonely here, but humans are not usually very good companions for us.”

“Everybody thought he was a vampire to begin with.”

“But he is not.” And it’s a sad look in his father’s face, and Dick remembers the stories of his uncles, his aunts, the ones who ran off with humans never to be seen or heard from again, the ones whose blood craving got the better of them and who were staked even while they mourned for the one they killed, the ones who were tricked, deceived by humans they thought capable of loving them, and he knows his father’s fear and why it’s real, why it’s palpable, and why he is so worried about Dick getting himself into trouble. John stands up and runs a hand through his hair. “We are not a people who should invite catastrophe,” he says, and Dick frowns.

“I’m not,” he says, and rather than disagreeing, his father turns and walks away, returning to his dinner and the other performers. When he himself returns, the conversation has gone dark. Someone thought they saw Slade Wilson himself entering the fairgrounds, and it’s a bad omen for anyone who knows the hunter, knows what he does to people like them. It keeps the attention off of Count Wayne, and onto the fear that Slade might know what they are and have a plan to get rid of them. A different sort of anxiety creeps into him, but he tries to force it away. As long as they’re in the group, they’ll be fine. It’s the same defense mechanism that’s saved them all these years, anyway.

 

\--

 

It’s the best show they’ve had in years, if everyone’s being honest. Maybe it’s because they’re all so focused on proving what they are--or rather, what they’re not--so they throw everything into the performance. It’s wonderful. Haly almost wants to leave after it, being unsure they can top what they’ve done. John’s the one to calm him down, talk him off the ledge. “Wilson is still snooping around,” he says. “If we leave immediately, he’ll know we’re suspicious of him and he’ll follow us to the next city. It would be stupid to leave now when tonight’s crowd will draw an even larger one tomorrow.”

If he casts a look at Dick, neither of them say anything. They have an almost telepathic connection now, anyway: Get it out of your system, John seems to be saying. We’ll stay, but as soon as you’ve had your fill, we’re leaving and never coming back. At least, not during Bruce’s lifetime. Dick sneaks away, tries to ignore how if his father brings it up verbally, he’ll tell him he doesn’t want to leave. He’ll tell him that he wants to stay, needs to, doesn’t know why Bruce Wayne makes him feel like he has a heart that actually beats, just that he does. It’s tremendously foolish for a vampire to stay in one place, though. They became nomadic to begin with because people always, always, always begin to suspect them, whether it’s because of the bloodsucking or because, if they manage to stay under the radar with their feeding habits, they stop aging, or at least appear to.

Bruce waits for him at the edge of the fairgrounds. “There is a hotel, not far from here,” he starts, and Dick quirks an eyebrow at him. “I know--you said you need to stay close by, but I want to be alone with you.” Dick’s breath catches in the back of his throat and immediately, Bruce backpedals. “You don’t want to.”

The problem is, Dick does, Dick wants to very much, but he doubts he’d be accepted anywhere in the clothes he owns. His shirt is almost as old as he is, which is a feat in and of itself, and when not in the costume for the performances, the singlet with its long legs and beaded chest, he looks much more like a pauper than anything else. He wonders if maybe he’s managed to enchant Bruce the same way some of his younger “sisters” in the circus enchanted the men they carried off as midnight meals, tricking him into seeing a diamond when all that’s really there is a lump of coal. Or, maybe not. He’s not unattractive--maybe Bruce sees past the clothes and only gets an image of him.

“There’s a wagon near the fortune teller,” he says, and he reaches for Bruce’s hand. “She looks the other way if people pay her to let them use it.”

“She wouldn’t say anything?”

“No.” Not to anyone who would do anything to Bruce. To Dick’s parents? Well. It depends on whether or not she sees Dick coming into harm in the near future. Dick leads him towards the wagons, towards the old woman sitting outside them with a cigarette between two fingers and a card between two others. She plays solitaire when nobody else is around.

It’s a mostly silent transaction between the two of them, a question How much? and How much is he worth? and Dick turns to Bruce and asks, “What are you willing to pay?” He only has a few crumpled bills on him, having seen what happens when one wears their wealth in public, and the old woman smiles and pats his hand and pushes the money back towards him. Happiness is enough, sometimes. She works in a strange currency that nobody understands anymore.

In all the years that Dick has been around, he’s never had sex, has never found the occasion or anyone he particularly wanted to do it with. He waits while Bruce marvels at the fabrics of the wagon, at the fairy lights strung up, wondering where the source is, how it doesn’t burn down, before deciding that the person in front of him is worth more wondering. Dick shivers when Bruce’s hands graze up his side and he sucks in a deep breath.

“There’s something I have to tell you,” he says, and Bruce stops a hair’s breadth away.

“Is something wrong?”

He licks his lips, turns his head. “I really like you,” he says, and he frowns and sits down. Part of him wants to tell Bruce, knows he needs to tell him, but instead he bites down on it and smiles at Bruce. He wants to cry.

Instead of responding, Bruce leans in and kisses him and it’s already clear that Bruce has had difficulties expressing himself in language for most of his life, maybe stemming from before his parents’ deaths, but more likely, Dick thinks, from that particular moment where he became too paralyzed to think. It’s not the first time Bruce has reacted with action instead of words and it’s refreshing, Dick thinks. His family speaks in action all the time and being with Bruce like this feels like being home.

He leans into it, makes the decision to tell him, tomorrow, before he has to pack up and leave with the rest of the circus. “Will you be here, tomorrow night?” he asks, and Bruce stops for a moment and rests his forehead against Dick’s.

“If you were here every night, so would I be,” he says. His shoulders feel so broad under Dick’s hands, and his mouth is hot and insistent against Dick’s and Dick can’t help but buck his hips up, work his fingers around Bruce’s bright red tie to get it off him. Maybe if it were anyone else, it’d be a lovely lie to be told, but Bruce’s heartbeat is steady, and Dick trusts him, knows that that Bruce means it, and he still cries against Bruce’s shoulder at the knowledge that none of this, for them, can be permanent.

 

\--

 

Dick is descending the ladders from the trapeze bars, ready to stand to the side while his parents take on the main attraction, when he hears the opening bars of “Stars and Stripes Forever.” He feels himself still, and then sees the fire, sees it climbing up the walls of the big top, and he screams up to his parents and they look at him but it’s not quick enough, not quick enough to get them to jump, to fly away (and nobody knew that the Flying Graysons really could fly, or glide at least), before the fireball comes spilling down towards them.

He’s had this nightmare before, has seen it too many times in his sleep, and now it feels like he is stuck to the ground unable to move. Men and women scream and he can smell the burning flesh and he can’t bring himself to leave, wants to rush towards what might be left of his parents--if there’s something left, maybe there’s something he can do, some way to save them--but even as he wishes, he knows that there’s nothing left, that fire is the one thing that incinerates even vampires. Instead, he turns and looks for Bruce, begins to panic even more when he can’t see him, has to remember to listen for him and then he finds him trapped under a beam, bleeding out while a little boy with dark hair is nearby, screaming for his parents who are somewhere under fallen bleachers.

He grabs them both, pushes the beam off of Bruce with strength he didn’t know he had, drags them away from the fire. People are screaming, running back into the tent to look for their family members. He caught a glimpse at some people jumping from the bleachers, doesn’t know how to tell them that it might not work.

All he can smell is Bruce’s blood and he stares at the man. “What happened?” he asks, and the little boy starts crying.

“He pushed me out of the way! I didn’t mean to--”

“Bruce--”

“Dick.” It comes out raspy, and Dick wants to scream, wishes he was back in with his parents than having to feel Bruce dying. “It’s alright.”

“It’s not alright!” The smell of blood draws his teeth out and he knows, instinctively, what to do, how to turn him, even if his parents told him that he was never, ever supposed to do it, even if he knows Slade Wilson is still around, is probably the one who set the fire to begin with, would kill them both--he turns to the little boy. “You need to hide,” he says, and the boy shakes his head stubbornly. “It’s not safe.”

“I want to stay.”

He doesn’t know what will happen if he does manage to turn Bruce. He doesn’t know what kind of monster Bruce might be, doesn’t know what kind of craving for blood he’ll have. It’s dangerous to turn people not only because of the threat to their person, but the danger to everyone else around them. “What’s your name?” he asks, and he knows he doesn’t have much time before he loses Bruce.

“Tim.”

“Alright, Tim.” He wants to reassure the boy, wants to tell him that whatever happens, he’ll take care of him, but he has to turn his attention back to Bruce. “There was something I wanted to tell you last night, but I couldn’t--”

“It’s alright,” Bruce says, and Dick shakes his head.

“It’s not,” he answers, and he smiles and wipes his face. He’s crying. He’s been crying. He dives down to Bruce’s neck, bites down and feels a warm gush of blood flooding his mouth. It’s the most wonderful taste he’s ever had and he panics that he won’t be able to stop in time, and he feels Bruce wincing, going limp. When he pulls off, mouth red and wet, Bruce’s eyes are wide and hurt--How could you do this?--and Dick wants to explain, wishes he could, but instead bites down on his own forearm. He bleeds, bleeds too much, it feels like. “You need to drink it,” he says, and he’s shaking, pressing the wound to Bruce’s mouth. If Tim is afraid behind him, he’s not showing it.

Bruce resists at first and Dick fears--fears that he’s killed him himself, and that there’s nothing to be done, but then he feels the sucking on his skin, feels Bruce getting stronger, tries not to gasp when Bruce sits up and moves from Dick’s arm to his neck, almost draining him, and he cries out, pushes on his shoulders. “Stop, stop!” he shouts, and Bruce, eyes dark and afraid of himself, does.

“What have you done?” Bruce asks, and Dick sobs against his shoulder.

“I couldn’t let you die,” he answers, and to his surprise, Bruce embraces him, pulls him close and to his feet.

“We need to get out of here,” he says, and he seems to know already what he is. He turns to Tim, looks like he might have devoured the child if it weren’t for the fact that there’s something too close between them. “You didn’t turn him, too, did you?”

“No,” he says. “You saved his life, and I--”

The question becomes what to do with the boy. If they leave him here, there’s too much of a chance that something bad--something worse--could happen. Bruce has seen what happens to children sent to orphanages. Tim’s stubbornness against leaving might mean he’s not afraid of either of them. Bruce makes the decision, then, brings them both to his manor and makes the decision that they’ll talk about this later.

 

\--

 

When Tim turns 19, he asks to be turned, too. He’s seen enough of them together to know what he wants, he thinks. Dick tells him that there’s no going back. Tim says, he doesn’t care. Please, he says, I want to be like you. Tim cries before he’s turned, and then, when he’s alive again, looks into the mirror (because it isn’t as though the myth about reflections has any truth to it), and finally feels happy in his own skin.

 

\--

 

In what feels like a year, half a century passes by and Dick wakes in a dark room next to Bruce. He misses his heartbeat, misses his warmth, but he curls closer to him anyway, and Bruce turns to wrap an arm around him. It’s not so much that he regrets the choice to turn him, but he still has nightmares about his parents, has nightmares about the entire circus burning down. The papers the next day said that there were no survivors, that somehow, the fire had spread from wagon to wagon. Even the animals were victims.

He shivers and Bruce pulls the blankets up tighter. “We should be getting up,” Dick says, and Bruce frowns, keeps his eyes shut. When Dick kisses him, he can’t help but respond, moves his hands and pulls Dick close to him, opens his eyes and rolls so that he’s on top.

“What’s another hour?” he asks, and Dick swallows, bares his neck.

“I guess it isn’t so bad,” he answers, and he lets out a sigh when Bruce’s teeth sink into the expanse of his skin.

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> Friendly reminder that comments are the lifeblood of a writer.


End file.
